Comment by xurias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xurias | Hacker News Reader

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I find Schmachtenburger hard to listen to. He rejects all media outright because it's all not true or propaganda. Might as well go live in a cave. If you listen to news, whether it's a podcast, a news channel, an article, or whatever, there's always a bias. But the solution isn't to reject all bias, it's to accept that bias is fundamental to human existence and to learn how to deal with bias while consuming that media. It's why I can listen to certain kinds of conservative media and not have my head explode - even if I disagree with many of their premises, I'm able to recognize what is fact, what is supposed fact, what is informed analysis and what is pure opinion, such that I can still extract value from it. More importantly, I can generally can recognize whether somebody is making a good faith argument or simply pushing a point to achieve certain goals or push an agenda.

Yeah, I would discern personal bias from institutional distortion.

I can deal with biases because like you said I can sense truthfulness (good faith), and triangulate multiple sources to form an image by trusting my own bias. Bias and different perspectives are everywhere and carry valuable signals.

What I can’t sense is that I can check all sources to find what is actually true. His solution is to proxy our sense-making to some collective intelligence (community) grown in a positive-sum game. But our current game is zero-sum, and information becomes competitive rather than collaborative, which incents (guarantees) institutional distortion (e.g. obscuring, disinforming, context-shrinking).

Aside for describing the problem, I think he covers some practical ways to make sense of things in the broken information ecology, but I haven’t gone over that part in any detail yet.

I'm exactly the same. I actually consider it a matter of intellectual honesty to listen to 'the other sides' of what I believe/think. I didn't know this was called Hegellian dialectic but that's exactly it (just generalized beyond dichotomy, a multi-dimensional 'tension' to account for nuance and complexity).

I find that it gives me a much better "BS" (bad faith or belief-driven argument) whichever side it comes from; and the good arguments are then free to flow irrespective of our perception of 'sides': it does not matter who said it, or whether it contradicts other elements; if there's truth to it, then it deserves to be explored, integrated. That's reality for us.

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